Minecraft” has 204 million active players per month. It’s one of the most popular games in the world at the moment — far from what one would consider an “indie” game. Upon its original release, however, that’s exactly what it was.
This is the case for many games today — they released indie and found their fame, then they were sold to larger companies and transcended the “small indie game” category. This transition tends to take away some of these games’ sparkle if you ask me.
Plenty of games have gone through this cycle in their lifetime. “Mario” began as an indie game; more recently games like “Five Nights at Freddy’s” have done the same. In the previously indie games I’ve played, I think the installments that release after they become AAA are generally worse.
To put it all into context, I play primarily indie games. My top three favorite games at the moment are all indie and don’t seem to display any signs of changing that fact.
All of them receive somewhat consistent updates to their platform, whether that’s in the form of a new game in a series — in the case of the “Bendy and the Ink Machine” franchise — or in regular updates to the game itself, seen in both “Stardew Valley” and “Phasmophobia.”
But this isn’t to say that AAA games are bad. Games that have been AAA for most of or all of their lifetime typically don’t have the issues that ex-indie games have. The “Resident Evil” franchise is a good example of this phenomenon — it’s a series that has been AAA for decades now, and it doesn’t have that distinct “cash grab because we have money now” feel that I see in a lot of games that used to be indie.
To me, the issue seems to be within the transition. Games that are indie and stay indie have a consistent level of quality; and games that are AAA and stay AAA have a consistent level of quality. But when indie games transition to be AAA, it’s usually because they sold to larger, public companies. “Minecraft” was sold to Microsoft; “Five Nights at Freddy’s” was sold to Steel Wool Studios; “Hades” and “Little Nightmares” have both been sold to Supermassive Games.
Most of the time, these companies lack the passion for the game that the original indie developers had — their interests lie closer to the money. This shift in care is extremely evident in the finished product. This is a common argument in many fanbases, with complaints rolling in with each new “Minecraft” update; and online analyses of everything disappointing about “Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach,” the first non-indie installment in its franchise.
The feedback all rings with the same tune — less passion, worse quality, players miss how it was before. When indie games receive their updates, comments like this are far less common. These reviews are also less prevalent when new installments of longstanding AAA games are released.
When a consistent level of passion exists in the developer, work done on the game is bound to show that, but when it undergoes that transition, the passion changes, and that’s when it’s noticed.
